Nick Mason examines Pink Floyd's early years with Saucerful of Secrets

Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason is explaining how he came to launch a solo project as Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets.

"After 20-something years, I was absolutely tired of waiting for the phone to ring with Roger or David going ‘C’mon guys, let’s get the band back together.’ I thought, ‘Forget that. It’s not gonna happen.' I really got to the point where I thought I could never work again."

Roger and David, of course, are Mason's former bandmates Roger Waters and David Gilmour, with whom he last performed as Pink Floyd in 2005 at Live 8, as did keyboard player Richard Wright, who died of cancer in 2008.

Two years after Live 8, Mason, Wright and Gilmour played together at a tribute to the late Syd Barrett, who was ousted from Pink Floyd in 1968 for erratic behavior and died of cancer in 2006. Waters performed at that tribute as well but not as part of Pink Floyd.

The three surviving members did perform a song together during Waters' staging of "The Wall" at the O2 Arena in London, 2011. But with Waters and Gilmour repeatedly saying they have no intention of touring together as Pink Floyd, it makes sense that Mason eventually would give up on waiting for the phone to ring and get his own thing going.

Their Mortal Remains

Another motivating factor, Mason says, was the unveiling of an exhibition in 2017 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London called Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains

"It was very successful," Mason says. "A lot of people came. But it suddenly just made me feel like the Tower of London or something. It was all about this ancient history. And there was that feeling that the one thing that was lacking was actually playing music. So that was a catalyst for me, I think. I ended up talking quite a lot about the history of the band and so on but the reality is what I really wanted to do was play some music."

Which is not to say that Mason had been sitting on his hands these past two decades.

"I’ve done quite a bit of recording," he says. "And I actually did some touring with Roger when he was doing the 'Dark Side' tour. I did some playing with David, when he did the ‘Endless River’ album. It wasn’t that I was sort of just sat at home watching television, waiting for the next Chuck Norris special to come on."

But spending a day or two making a record and actually touring proper are two very different life pursuits.

"When we toured Europe last year," Mason says, "every day is the opportunity to develop the playing – your own playing but also the song or the arrangement and adding something to it. That’s what’s so satisfying, is by the end of the tour, however good you all are, by the time you’ve done 20 dates, that last show is so much better than the first."

Once he'd made his mind up to get something going, Mason reached out to his former bandmates just to let them know what he had planned.

"I thought it would be sort of a courtesy to tell them both what I was doing," Mason says. "And they were great. Roger threatened to come down and play some time. I think one day David might do the same. He lent me loads of equipment that we needed to go out. So they were both great, actually."

The Spandau Ballet touch

"Gary was a bit of a surprise," Mason says. "In a way, it was rather pathetic of myself because I fell for thinking if you’re in one genre of rock music, you’re not gonna make the transition to something else, whereas actually he’s been the surprise star to some extent because his guitar playing is just fantastic. And it’s nothing to do with what he did in Spandau but it’s absolutely everything that’s right for what we’re doing."

Mason's Saucerful of Secrets takes its name from Pink Floyd's second album and the last to feature Barrett, 1968's "A Saucerful of Secrets."

It was during the recording of that album that they parted ways with Barrett, a pivotal moment in their history.

"I think if you look at the Pink Floyd story," Mason says, "it’s a wonder that we continued without Syd because he was such an important part, He was a major writer. He was the front man as well. But I think by the time Syd left, we had such a commitment or an enthusiasm to wanting the band to play and to work that we just found a way of carrying on because I think for probably six months – well, until we actually finished 'Saucer,' it was like the tide going out."

There’s video, he says, of Pink Floyd playing songs that Barrett sang and wrote on television shows with Gilmour miming Barrett's vocal or singing the song himself.

"It was a very odd transition," Mason says, "where part of the time was spent in the past and then there’s suddenly this whole new thing of Roger’s writing which you get on ‘Saucerful of Secrets,’ where it goes into something like ‘Set the Controls.’"

The bassist who went on to write a number of their iconic moments had contributed "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk" to their debut, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn."

But to Mason's ears, that was "a really average song," whereas "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun," he says, "for me, is one of the best songs Roger has written; so it’s a very curious transition, and some of those things are a continuation of what Syd did, i.e. the sort of improvised sections in songs."

Pre-'Dark Side of the Moon' music

British rock legend Roger Waters, co-founder of the group Pink Floyd, sings during a performance at Hong Kong's Convention and Exhibition Centre, 15 February 2007, as an image of the late Syd Barrett (L), the other co-founder and original member of Pink Floyd, is projected on the back screen.(Photo: RICHARD A. BROOKS, AFP/Getty Images)

In addition to taking the name of a 1968 release, Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets puts the focus squarely on the seven albums they did prior to "The Dark Side of the Moon," the 15-times-platinum smash with which they cracked the U.S. market, taking up seemingly permanent residence on Billboard's album charts for 900-some weeks.

Mason's goal going into the project, he says, was "wanting really to find things I was familiar with and sort of knew well and liked that were part of my history but were not being done really by almost everyone else with a guitar. With Roger out on the road, David out on the road and every decent tribute band playing ‘Comfortably Numb,’ I wanted to revisit the spirit of those early days, where there is room for improvisation. It’s a sort of freer area and it’s also quite nice to bring maybe something that people are less familiar with and might enjoy."

He's well aware that fewer people know those older records.

"I think from the USA point of view, perhaps more than Europe, a lot of people don’t realize there is a pre-story for Pink Floyd," Mason says. "They sort of joined up for 'Dark Side' and that was it, whereas maybe in Europe, people were a little more familiar with the Syd Barrett story and the sort of things we were doing in the very late ‘60s, early ‘70s."

As to whether he himself had listened to those early albums in the past, say, 40 years or so, he says, "Not much. I mean, I tend not to listen to anything we’ve done. I always find it a bit disturbing listening to too much of our own material. There’s a tendency to think, 'Mmm, we shouldn’t have done it like that.'"

Mason revisits the past

But he quite enjoyed revisiting those records to prepare for this.

"What I found was that it was slightly more complicated than I remembered," he says. "I thought I knew all the arrangements of the songs and they were ingrained in my mind forever. But it was really interesting actually picking them apart a bit and seeing how Syd had put things together. It didn’t always work to eight bars, 16 bars, whatever. Sometimes, there’s some really curious elements in the music."

Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets(Photo: JFurmanovsky)

It's only natural that Pink Floyd had moved on from much of the material he's playing on this tour as time went on.

"The first American tour, well, Syd was on the tour," Mason says. "The second tour, we had some new music but only some. But very quickly, what you want to do is what you’ve most recently played. By the time you're into your sort of seventh or eighth album, you’re going to be selecting the songs that you’re most interested in, which will not be off your first album."

Revisiting those early songs in concert, Mason says, was "like a time machine. That was extraordinary. I sat behind the drums in a pub in South London the first night we played and I just thought, ‘I remember this.’ It was great. And for me, that’s the best bit of it."